Oppy is now barely 200m away from Santa Maria crater, and the latest images sent back by the rover show a LOT of detail, and confirm what the orbital images taken by MRO’s HiRISE camera suggested – that Santa Maria is surrounded by a large number of very impressive sized boulders and blocks of stone, including some quite dark ones.

Here’s a panorama I made from three of the most recent raw images…

If you click on that image you’ll see just how hefty-looking some of those boulders are. I can’t wait for Oppy to get a closer look at them once she starts driving amongst them; some of them are as big as Oppy herself if not bigger…